My Four Reasons for this Article
- To be aware that our music began with God’s creation of mankind.
- When I write these powerful Truths from the Word of God, I use them as conversational entry points to communicate biblical Truth to many people, including those who are not-yet-Christians. Friends, it is illuminating as I listen to the responses from the wonderful people I interact with. I have discovered that people outside of Christ are not expecting some kind of watered-down, sensitized version of Christianity. They want to know what the Bible says about multiple things in our culture. Perhaps we ought to be better able to provide biblical clarity on more of these subjects. Please do not limit yourself by thinking non-Christians have to have a certain kind of tenderized version of the Good News of Jesus Christ. They don’t!
- This article emphasizes the power and importance of musical praise, especially as sung by the whole congregation of the saints. [Psalm 107:32 ESV] Let them extol Him in the congregation of the people, and praise Him in the assembly of the elders,
- To enlarge your capacity to venerate people worthy of respect. I am venerating (deep respect for) a godly hero, Martin Luther. If we forget the past, we forfeit the present and do not prepare for the future.
Music in the Noahic Record
[Genesis 4:19-21 NLT] 19 Lamech married two women. The first was named Adah, and the second was Zillah. 20 Adah gave birth to Jabal, who was the first of those who raise livestock and live in tents. 21 His brother’s name was Jubal, the first of all who play the harp and flute.
The Noahic record indicates that early men were very competent in brass and iron metallurgy, as well as agriculture, animal husbandry, and urbanization. The same is true for musical instruments, and it is evident that the science and art of both metallurgy and music, as well as agriculture and animal husbandry, had been handed down from ancient times to the earliest post-flood civilizations. Modern archaeology is confirming the high degree of technology associated with the earliest human settlers all over the world.
You might find helpful the article I wrote on April 1, 2020, “Were Ancient People as Primitive and Ignorant as We Have Been Taught?” You can find it on page 9 of my blog: www.daleebel.org.
Being created in the image of God, Adam and Eve and their progeny had a moral consciousness, abstract thought, an appreciation of beauty, emotions, and an eternal spirit capable of communion and fellowship with their Creator (Elohim). From the above verses we know, in part, that they created music that reflected the image of God. Of course, over the generations music has changed and is expressed in a variety of ways according to the cultures of the world, and not all people groups honored God in their music.
The Influence of Martin Luther (AD 1483-1546) Regarding Music
Martin Luther took the biblical—Augustinian philosophy of music out of the cloister to Europe’s masses. The Augustinian philosophy of music was rooted in the biblical expression of creation elevating Yahweh God as Elohim, the Creator of the universe. An Augustinian monk and pioneer of the Protestant revolution and reformation, Luther was and remains a polarizing figure to many people, yet many critics agree that Luther may have been the most influential figure of the Second Millennium.
Luther was a “Protestant” because he saw plenty in his world to protest against. But he did not become a reformer simply because he protested. He changed Europe because he found something worth singing about, something worth living for, and something worth dying for. He found a covenant relationship with Almighty God (El Shaddai)—a relationship that he could count upon. It was a Faith, a Worldview, upon which his decadent world could be rebuilt. Yet it was far more than an idea or a creed. It was a vibrant relationship of sacrificial love worthy of songs.
In large part, Luther became a reformer because he realized that in order to conform to God’s Word, all God’s children would need to have that Word in their native languages. He translated the Bible into his own German dialect. His translation went into hundreds of editions and turned his dialect into the “Standard German” for the whole of the German-speaking world. Together with Luther’s German hymnal, his Bible forged the soul of the German-speaking nations. Luther’s work also inspired other reformers such as William Tyndale, who began translating the Bible into English. That crucial beginning made the Bible the soul also of the English-speaking world.
Sing To One Another
[Ephesians 5:19 AMP] 19 Speak to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, [offering praise by] singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord;
Following Christ and the Apostles, the early church sang praise songs together until Jerome the Great encouraged priests to take over the chanted worship and praise in the fifth century. Therefore, Christians rarely sang during that period of time. And then when they did sing, they only sang in Latin, which they did not understand. By and large it was the priest’s job to worship, praise, and pray. Luther rediscovered the Renewed Covenant’s (NT) doctrine of the priesthood of the believer (1 Peter 2:9), which made it necessary for the entire congregation to praise God by singing, as well as by prayer and other means. Today, one of the ways to know if there is a significant portion of a congregation praising God is answering two questions, hopefully in the affirmative:
IS THE WHOLE CONGREGATION SINGING, and CAN THEY HEAR EACH OTHER SING SO THEY MAY EXPERIENCE PROFOUND UNITY IN SONG?
[Colossians 3:16 AMP] 16 Let the [spoken] word of Christ have its home within you [dwelling in your heart and mind–permeating every aspect of your being] as you teach [spiritual things] and admonish and train one another with all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
Luther believed that mankind is created for the expressed purpose of praising and extolling our Holy God (Yahweh-M’Kaddesh). Because of his belief in the priesthood of all believers, Luther wrote hymns in the language of the German people and brought music to the lungs and the lips of every person, even the poorest peasants in the congregation.
For Luther, God’s friendship gave such value and meaning to his life that he had something to sing about. Thus, in a world that had rebelled against the Creator, there was suffering. Yet, because God is loving and just, there is hope for pardon, peace, progress, and prosperity. The Good News of the Kingdom of God made the West uniquely optimistic, enabling it to sing, “Joy to the World”—a message opposite to that of the culture of the day.
Music after God’s Death
Denying the reality of a spiritual core rooted in Elohim God the Creator, as the essence of every human being, makes it hard to make sense of music, because music, like morality, is a matter of the body, soul, and spirit. Those who think that the universe is only material substance and that the soul is an illusion find it hard to explain music. Even uniformitarian evolutionists cannot explain how language and music evolved over millions and millions of years.
While Western music has gone through dozens of phases with thousands of permutations since the time of Luther and Bach, in some ways it was only during the 1980s that the expression of music expressed secular, pagan ideologies.
I now mention Kurt Cobain because he represented the ideology of nihilism (the rejection of all religious and moral principles, resulting in meaninglessness), rooted in atheism. He had a massive popular appeal to millions who reflected his beliefs.
Kurt Cobain was the lead singer and gifted guitarist for the rock band Nirvana. He captured his generation’s loss of anchor, center, or soul so effectively that their album Nevermind sold 10 million copies, displacing Michael Jackson at the top of the charts.
The Buddhist term Nirvana is the term for salvation. It means the permanent extinction of one’s individual existence, the dissolution of our illusionary individuality into a void of emptiness and nothingness.
The rejection of a good, caring, and almighty God, and the rejection of the biblical understanding of sin, ensured that there was no way to make sense of suffering—personal, societal, or environmental. Reality became senseless, hopeless, and painful, and thus the music of the time reflected this philosophy.
For centuries Western music reflected the philosophical understanding of Johannes Kepler’s biblical, Augustinian, Lutheran view of creation and music by teaching that music mirrors the divinely ordered mathematical harmony of the universe.
This was reflected in the fact that music was tonal. That is, its hallmark was loyalty to a tonic key/home note. Tonic means the first note in a scale which, in conventional harmony, provides the keynote of a piece of music. Every single piece gave preference to this note (the tonic), making it the tonal center (a reflection of an ordered and designed creation), to which all other tones were related. The breakup of tonality in Western music is said to have begun with Adolf Hitler’s hero, Richard Wagner, who experimented with atonality. Atonality means music is not written in any key or mode. Atonal music may be written by obscuring tonal structures, ignoring conventional harmonies altogether.
Cobain remains popular because, while many people claim to be nihilists, they don’t fully live it out. He did. He lived out his own reality through choice (or atonality). He lived in nihilism, and that is how he died—by suicide. Cobain became the symbol of the loss of center and meaning in the contemporary West. He was a reflection of the graphic description of Romans 1:18-32, which I summarize as:
“When Man Forgets who God is, He Forgets who he is.”
[Romans 1:28 NLT] 28 Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, He abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done. Please read Romans 1:18-32.
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (AD 1844-1910) was the personification of the ideology of Buddhism as a staunch atheist who popularized the death-of-God craze. He realized that, having killed God, Europe could not possibly save the civilizational fruits of its faith in God. But not even Nietzsche realized that one philosophical implication of God’s demise would be the death of his own self. For 1,500 years prior to Nietzsche, the West had followed St. Augustine (AD 354-430) in affirming every human being as a trinity of existence made up of body, soul, and spirit. After denying the existence of humans being created in the image of God, it became impossible to affirm the existence of our human selves. Therefore, since then many intellectuals have reverted to the Buddhist idea that self is an illusion. It is no surprise that Nietzsche came to this conclusion and believed that he never truly existed, for individuality is only an illusion created by language. As a result, he committed suicide, as did Kurt Cobain. ☹️
A Personal Story Regarding My History Teacher
I am mentioning my experience as a student because it reveals the encroachment of the pagan ideologies that are consistently taught today in most of our secular universities. It is important to me that we are aware of this blatant indoctrination, and even more importantly, how we might combat it, as I did in my small effort when I was confronted by my leftist, pagan teacher.
While a student at Oregon State University, I had a history professor named Dr. Shaw. In previous classes he chose to single me out because of my faith in Christ. (That’s for another discussion.) On numerous occasions I defended the Christian Faith and the Bible when he called me out in front of the class. In my study I discovered that Nietzsche committed suicide. At one point, when Dr. Shaw was celebrating many of the ideological concepts of Nietzsche, I raised my hand and asked the question, “Dr. Shaw, how did Nietzsche die?” He evaded my question, and so I politely raised my hand again and said, “I think it would be helpful for the class to know how Nietzsche died.” Reluctantly, he responded, “Well, he committed suicide.” I said, “That’s right, because he could not live with the implications of his own nihilistic ideology. Nietzsche believed and lived with the postmodern thought that he never existed, for individuality is only an illusion created by language.”
Silence fell over the class, with a long pause, before Dr. Shaw proceeded with his lecture. I had several significant private discussions about Christ, the Bible, and my faith with the students in the class as the quarter progressed. In my dialogue with Dr. Shaw, I never expected a positive outcome from him; I was embracing him for the students in his class. This proved to be very spiritually productive, with people finding Christ and becoming aware of the rationale of our Biblical Total Truth Worldview. Pretty redemptive, I would say!
Applications
- Create your own self-generated ministry. Please do not rely only on your church or Christian organization to provide or have a ministry for you to do. I fulfilled my ministry as a salaried professional pastor, but I have found great fulfillment in my present ministry of mentoring men, writing biblical teachings for my blog, counseling and consulting pastors, and intentionally influencing our grandchildren. Colossians 3:23; Psalm 78:6.
- Daily share about Jesus Christ and His Kingdom with anyone who will listen. They are there in abundance! Please, our Lord Jesus Christ came to seek and save the lost. Luke 9:10; Acts 17:17. Come on, gang, increase your biblical knowledge so you may provide Truth to those you encounter.
- Pass this article on to your pastor and praise leader in your church. Are the people in your church services praising God in exuberant song so they can hear each other and exalt the living God together? 1 Peter 2:9. Like I have said over the years, If we think we are leading and no one is following, we are only taking a walk. 🚶
- Increase your times of praise, which is voicing out loud God’s attributes back to Him. This brings our Holy God (Yahweh-M’Kaddesh) great pleasure! Psalm 7:17; 28:7; 35:28. Praise can be in songs, hymns, and spiritual songs, or simply speaking to each other in verbal acknowledgment of His attributes. Psalm 51:15; 63:3.
- Make efforts to venerate (give due respect) out loud to others the great godly heroes of the Christian Faith and our national heroes. Ezekiel 23:23; Hebrews 11; 2 Peter 2:17.
Below are only some of them, off the top of my head: John Wesley, George Washington, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, Henrietta Mears, John Adams, George Whitefield, Winston Churchill, Bill Bright, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Please keep in mind that for every hero we must learn to see the good and the not-so-good simultaneously. I hope this is how people remember me, and I am sure these are your sentiments about yourself as well.
[Psalm 47:5-7 NKJV] 5 God has gone up with a shout, The LORD with the sound of a trumpet. 6 Sing praises to God, sing praises! Sing praises to our King, sing praises! 7 For God [is] the King of all the earth; Sing praises with understanding.
Together we sing for Joy of our Lord Jesus Christ!!
In His Strong Name,
Dale